


let the die be cast

by vangoghstars



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greek Religion & Lore Fusion, Angst, Clay | Dream-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Dream Team SMP Spoilers, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Modern Setting Retelling of Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, No Dialogue, no beta we die like wilbur soot, or barely any, spans the entire dream smp timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vangoghstars/pseuds/vangoghstars
Summary: “Will the end justify the means?” he asks once when he’s feeling especially brave.“Yes,” Dream answers without hesitation. It is all in the name of family.//A oneshot based around DSMP!Dream's comment that he wants to unite the server as "one big happy family" centered around Greek Gods. Each character is a reincarnation of a Greek deity.WARNING: This oneshot contains spoilers for the entire plot of the Dream SMP including BadBoyHalo and Ranboo's visits to the prison on January 30th.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), No Romantic Relationship(s), Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit
Comments: 6
Kudos: 112





	let the die be cast

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Please enjoy this oneshot. I had such massive brainrot over this idea that I wrote it in like one afternoon and here we are. Just a note before we begin- the gender is going to get really confusing in this story for a bit and then mellow out, so just try to hang on. I’m adding a list at the bottom of the corresponding characters and gods so we don't all go nuts. 
> 
> This oneshot will contain spoilers for the plot of Dream SMP up to and including January 30th (Both BadBoyHalo and Ranboo's visits to the prison, though Ranboo's visit will never explicitly be mentioned or described). 
> 
> Thank u so much for reading and if u wanna come shout at me on twitter abt this ur of course welcome to! @izzyhangout

When he wakes up again, it is in the body of a man. He is tanned and tall, donning a bright green hoodie and a pristine white mask made of clay burned in the fires of some kennel he will never remember. He learns very quickly that he’s fit to run, fast and long strides, over trees, over oceans, over plains. 

He runs because that is what he is born to do. 

It is easy to fall into routine, to spend his days hopping over tree branches and rocks. He watches the sun rise and fall from the mountaintops of this barren land. 

In his spare time, he grieves. 

He misses his family desperately and achingly. Sometimes he can feel them in the silence of the night, in the darkness of it too. They surround him and drown him.

Eventually, though, as he often does, he gets tired of running away. This body may be fit for constant movement, but the soul inside of it is crammed in like sardines, squished down to fit in this space and time and person. He does not like how confining it feels, so he lets himself go free. 

He feels his consciousness spread over the empty forests and the emptier lakes. Where it goes, it claims the ground, marks off a land with a shimmering blue border. 

Dream SMP, he calls it, because it feels right to call it that. 

It is home.

He spends the first year alone within the borders of his land, as he has spent the last thousands of years alone. 

When the silence gets overbearing, when he starts to run out of land to clear, he extends his essence out, a call to the universe broadcasted on loop. 

He knows they will answer eventually. It is hard to resist. 

The first ones to come are his brother and sister-in-law. His brother is as quiet as ever, laughing softly at his wife’s jokes while attempting to build a small wooden home fit for the three of them. 

If they remember, they do not let on. That is okay.

They go by different names now, he realizes. His brother has been given the name George, passed down from the word “farmer” in their native tongue. It does not suit him, but he wears it like a soft sweater nonetheless. His sister-in-law has chosen the name Sapnap, reminiscent of the crackling embers and licking flames he was pulled out of, so different from the way he was born before. 

Dream loves them all the same. Of course he does. 

The sun and the moon come next, Alyssa and Callahan. They never speak, tend to keep to themselves, but Dream is happy to have them on all the same. Callahan, who used to light up the darkness of the night, who was always so eager to watch the stars dance, stays close to the ground, never ventures too high up onto mountains. Dream wonders what has happened since he’s been away.

They are followed by the Harvest and the Blacksmith. Dream watches his sister with wary eyes, remembers the rage he had displayed, the massacres he had caused, when his daughter had been taken from him. This time, BadBoyHalo looks at George and Sapnap and looks through them. For that, Dream will always be grateful. 

Sam builds. He builds everything and nothing, houses and bases and forts. He goes away for a while, and Dream misses his son terribly. 

The last one to come is Dream’s youngest, the trickster child determined to get in the way. When Ponk instead establishes himself as the doctor of the Dream SMP, Dream is nothing short of stunned. 

At last, they are together. Dream sighs; the call relaxes, turns off. 

The residual energy of it bounces around though, through the worlds and beyond, until it lands on a set of twins. They find themselves pulled to the land of the Dream SMP, pulled to their stepmother. 

The older of the two, who is the younger this time around, has not changed at all. His hatred for men is only matched by his love of freedom and vicious desire to be known. His brother, god of so very many things, is his perfect match in every way. Opposites and equals, they bring with them havoc and chaos and home.

Where the twins go, their sister Athena follows. He is wild yet calculated, with an eye for war and a taste for victory. When he decides to declare independence, when he erects walls around a van and a tree to prove something to Dream, it is the beginning of a very long road down. 

Dream wishes he didn’t have to take it, but walks the first steps down anyway.

They divide. 

On one side stands Dream, queen mother, their beginning and their end. On the other, the twins and their sister. 

Wilbur, who is every bit as brilliant and calculating as the origin of his name suggests, takes in the goddess of revenge as his own. It scares Dream very deeply to watch them work together, feed off each other’s ambition. They make a great team. They feed off each other in a way only they know how, and Fundy’s rage thrives under Wilbur’s neglect.

When Dream sees his sister, goddess of the hearth and the home, who has been nothing but kind to everyone on the server, get rejected by the twins, he knows it is time to stop this. He watches Sapnap take Karl in close, whisper soothing words into his ear. 

He goes to his husband. He has watched the way the desire for power had warped him, the lack of recognition burning into his mind. He knows Zeus wants recognition, wants power, wants wealth and knowledge and a throne. Dream promises him all of that in exchange for a betrayal. 

“It was never meant to be,” the king of the gods says. The room explodes.

Athena hits the ground hard; Nemesis and Apollo follow him down. Artemis screams as loud as possible, but it falls on deaf ears. Dream has already made his decision so long ago, when that first call was sent out.

When he blows up their land, he begs forgiveness, He stands next to George and Sapnap against Artemis and feels regret. He does not know if the boy’s past skill with a bow will transfer over. When the arrow lands dead center in Tommy’s chest, when the water and the white shirt turn a deep red, he clenches his teeth. When he hands over his music discs, the thing that unites the twins, that has always united the twins, Dream weeps. 

He wishes for a better world, for the end of fighting, and it does not come. 

It is with Aphrodite’s arrival that Wilbur holds elections. Wilbur’s sister-in-law, not wanting to be outdone, proposes himself as a running mate, grabs an annoyed Hades to play the role of VP. Dream watches George and Quackity squabble from a distance while Wilbur and Tommy glare menacingly at the party of SWAG2020. 

Dream can feel himself losing allies, so he brings on his brother, the god of the reckless seas, to stand by his side. He hands Skeppy one of Tommy’s prized discs and asks him to keep it safe. 

When Dionysus declares that he is running for president, when Quackity makes a coalition government with him, when they win by 1% of the vote, Dream is ready. 

He watches his stepson break apart the twins and exile the sisters. He wonders how fast that will lead to Schlatt’s downfall. 

Dream knows what’s coming next. He can sense the blood ready to be spilled, the tensions boiling high. He watches Tubbo’s face age far beyond his years, Wilbur’s morph into an unrecognizable paranoid version of the man he used to be. 

When the god of war enters the server, dressed in his blood red cape and intricate gold crown, Dream is not surprised. After all, the two patrons of war have always worked better together. 

It is then that Dream decides he has had enough of the fighting. His family has been feuding since the beginning of time, their battles leveling mountains and bringing shattering earthquakes and destruction in their wake. 

It is time for them all to come home.

When he hands Wilbur the TNT, he prays for destruction. When he secretly guides wither skeletons towards Technoblade, he asks the universe for a grand finale. 

The universe, as always, delivers. 

Dionysus crumples to the floor, dead. Dream watches Ares unleash the withers he so carefully put in the god’s path. The blast from Athena’s TNT lights up the world, scorches all the grass around it. 

When Chaos, the first of them, the only one he has no power to control, joins, Dream is not surprised. 

Athena, goddess of wisdom and battle strategy, dies quickly and painfully, a smile on his face. 

Dream does not mourn Wilbur Soot. 

It is just as much a surprise to Dream as it is to the rest of them when his many-eyed servant joins. He does not recognize Argus at first; this version of him is tall and nervous, with wandering green and red eyes that watch passersby happily. 

When Dream finds out that his loyal Ranboo has memory issues, he is overjoyed. Ranboo is the perfect pawn, the last missing piece in this game towards Dream’s final goal. 

Ranboo will bring peace back to the server.

Ranboo, it turns out, is annoyingly righteous in his belief that Dream is a bad person. He will only ever talk to his past master when in one particular form, a self-described “sleepwalk state.” Dream has come too far to back down, so he accepts Argus’ help in any form he can get it. 

When Tommy destroys George’s house, ruins the peace that has finally settled into the server, Dream knows he has to get rid of his stepdaughter. It’s laughably easy to manipulate Tubbo into doing the work for him, to get Tommy to lie and remove any blame from Ranboo. 

The boat ride away from L’Manberg is slow and long. Tommy sits through most of it in silence. Dream wonders what would happened if he mentioned a very similar boatride, a woman cast away by Dream himself, forced to bear twins on the island of Delos. He decides not to say anything. Better to leave the past buried.

If he’s a little meaner to Tommy that he should be, it’s not his fault. The goddess Artemis has the nastiest habit of getting in the way of Dream’s Big Plan, the one he’s been setting so carefully in motion since the days of Wilbur’s arrival, and he’s come too far now to be thwarted by some  _ child _ . 

He burns Tommy’s armor. It is only fair. 

It is Ares of all people who rescues Tommy in the end, Dream’s own skin and blood. His son has grown resentful and fidgety during his retirement. Dream knew it would never last. The call to war is too strong to ignore. 

He sends Technoblade off with a map to an unknown treasure, said to protect its user from the underworld. He collects Eris, goddess of strife and discord, to fight off an angered Quackity. Punz agrees; of course he does. 

Technoblade and Tommy have become predictable. Dream watches Tommy fight with his twin as Dream hurls heavy insults at Apollo. He watches Techno’s face crumble when Tommy chooses Tubbo over him, when he betrays Techno to side with the country that has done nothing for him and will never do anything for him.

_ It is all in the name of family _ , he reminds himself as he outs Ranboo as a traitor and blames Tubbo for the downfall of New L’Manberg. 

Philza Minecraft, Dream had realized early on, was really a force better left alone. He could wiggle his way out of any situation, which is why Dream is so surprised that Phil actively puts himself  _ in _ the situation. 

They sit and watch TNT rain down on New L’Manberg together from the obsidian grid above. 

“Don’t think I don’t recognize you, mate,” Phil tells him, watching him from the corner of his eyes. “I worry what you’re in pursuit of is unattainable.” 

“Thank you for the insight, Lord Chaos,” Dream responds. “But I am almost there.”

Argus, ever loyal, helps him take the disc back from Skeppy. They work side by side on Dream’s Vault, the room stretching out across the inside of the mountain. Ranboo is silent, mostly, his green eye dulled while the red one shines on. 

“Will the end justify the means?” he asks once when he’s feeling especially brave. 

“Yes,” Dream answers without hesitation.  _ It is all in the name of family _ .

The twins come together as he expects them too. They are foolish and weak, two young idiots trying to take down a person four steps ahead of them. 

Dream wishes he felt remorse when he threatens Tubbo’s life, when he gets Tommy to hand back over the discs. 

He doesn’t. He burns the fake items in front of Artemis’ eyes. 

Dream only feels anything when he watches his family fold through the portal, watches them turn angry eyes towards him. Eris leads them, the anger burning hot in his eyes. 

“You should have paid me more,” Punz says. Dream wishes he knew how to respond. 

His cries to his son, the god of blood and of war, fall on deaf ears. He wonders when they grew so apart. 

It is Artemis who takes up the blade against him. It is Tommy who looks Dream in the eyes for the first time in months and demands he throws his items in a pit. 

Dream feels the sword pierce through his skin and does not fight. He has bigger plans. 

It is his own son who leads him to the prison, throws him menacingly behind walls of lava and obsidian. 

“You’re a monster,” Hephaestus tells him. Dream does not flinch. 

He instructs Ranboo to start mining from the outside in as Dream speaks to Tommy and Bad. He tells them he misses the sun and the sky, that he longs for a world with more to do than move a clock on a wall. 

He throws himself into fire just to feel the burn. Artemis and Demeter do not feel bad for him.

_ One day, _ he tells himself.  _ We will be together again. One big happy family. _

Hera, the goddess of family, sighs. 

**Author's Note:**

> List of characters and the gods/beings they correspond to: 
> 
> Dream- Hera  
> Sapnap- Persephone  
> Technoblade- Ares  
> George- Hades  
> Tommy- Artemis  
> Tubbo- Apollo  
> Karl- Hestia  
> Quackity- Aphrodite  
> Schlatt- Dionysus  
> Wilbur- Athena  
> Eret- Zeus  
> BadBoyHalo- Demeter  
> Skeppy- Poseidon  
> Awesamdude- Hephaestus   
> Ranboo- Argus  
> Callahan- Selene  
> Alyssa - Helios  
> Fundy- Nemesis  
> Phil- Chaos  
> Punz- Eris


End file.
